Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on Thursday. Here’s a look back at some of what THE WEEKLY STANDARD has had to say about the musician:
“Not all great poets—like Wallace Stevens—are great singers,” Bob Dylan once suggested. “But a great singer—like Billie Holiday—is always a great poet.” It would be an enterprise in itself to disentangle the many ways in which this brief statement is dead wrong. The antithesis, if it is meant as an antithesis, between poet and singer, is false to begin with. The “not all” is based on a nonexpectation: How many poets have been singers at all? Certainly not Dylan Thomas, the Welsh boozer and bawler from whom Bob Dylan—a Jewish loner from Hibbing, Minnesota, who was born as Robert Zimmerman—annexed his nom de chanteur.
-Christopher Hitchens, “America’s Poet,” from our July 5, 2004, issue.
He is one of the great artists of the century. -Andrew Motion, England’s poet laureate, 2000 The great artist of the past fifty years, I believe. -Joe Klein, Time, 2009 Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup, Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop, Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead, Wiggle, you can raise the dead -Bob Dylan, ‘Wiggle Wiggle,’ 1990 If you needed more evidence, the release this month of Bob Dylan’s Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart, should close the case. Dylan fans are like Baby Huey dolls, those inflatable figures with the big red nose and the rounded bottom, weighted so that when you punch them—punch hard, punch with all your might—they bounce right back, grinning the same frozen, unchangeable grin. We can only make a guess how Bob Dylan truly feels about his fans. But it can be a good, strong guess. He’s been punching those Baby Hueys for a long time, hard.
-Andrew Ferguson, “Hark! The Herald Dylan Sings,” from our November 9, 2009, issue.
In the mid-1960s the most celebrated folk musician of his era bought a house for his growing family at the southern edge of the Catskills, in the nineteenth-century painters’ retreat of Woodstock. He was a “protest singer,” to use a term that was then new. His lyrics—profound, tender, garrulous—sounded like they were indicting the country for racism (“where black is the color where none is the number”), or prophesying civil war (“you don’t need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows”), or inviting young people to smoke dope (“everybody must get stoned”). Fans and would-be acolytes were soon roaming the town on weekends, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Eccentric-looking by the standards of the day, they infuriated local residents. Nothing good was going to come of it.
-Christopher Caldwell, “AWOL from the Summer of Love,” from our March 16, 2015, issue.
